Brevity at a cost of confusion

Sometimes phone messages get lost in translation especially when using the the speech-to-text function.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or because I view text message abbreviations with mild indifference, but I seem to no longer be able to remember them that well.

Back in high school I was all like LOL and GR8 and now I’m just like WTF?

I’m certainly not ROFL and I really don’t know why it became so important in 2002 to start cutting more than half the letters out of words.

TBH I find it a pain and I still write everything out in long form when I’m messaging someone because I believe it’s important to not confuse people.

Although text message abbreviations don’t seem to be as common as they used to be, they still pop up on social media every now and then.

At times I have found myself Googling terms or asking BAE what they mean.

Actually BAE is probably one of the most stupid and overused terms at the moment. It is commonly used to refer to your SO but the internet seems a bit confused as to whether it means ‘‘baby’’ or ‘‘before anyone else’’.

Whichever it is, it doesn’t make the term any less ridiculous and IDK why anyone would really feel the need to parade it around as an endearment.

BY&M I never minded the text abbreviations until one of my friends suggested that I may be overusing them.

I thought about this and realised he was right and since then I’ve been acronym-free until this column.

How RU going, anyway?

Do you know what most of the text abbreviations in this story are or RU scratching UR head in confusion?

I’m not going to lie, there’s at least one that I’m not so familiar with and I doubt even a FOAF would use it IRL.

At the end of the day, text messaging abbreviations are certainly not terms you would say to someone’s face and for that we should be thankful.

I don’t think IMU or ILU would have the same impact as I miss you or I love you, so at least for now we can be thankful that they have penetrated our spoken language.

Oh well, TTFN and TGIF 2morrow!

Hopefully you don’t need to be a cryptologist to crack this column’s code.

Sionnie Kelly is a News reporter. To see her weekly column that doesn’t involve text abbreviations, read Weekend Life in Saturday’s Weekend News.